Otters and Others

RAVEN SEEK THY BROTHER by Gavin Maxwell. 210 pages. Dutton. $6.95.

Gavin Maxwell is a kilted Scots eccentric who likes to live in conditions of barbarous discomfort in the bleakest of bleak houses on the icy shores of the most inhospitable islands left in Europe. Like all semi-hermits, he enjoys telling the world how much he does not miss it and informing man that he prefers the company of others, particularly otters. Ring of Bright Water, his book about his ottery on the coast of the West Highlands of Scotland, was a British and U.S. bestseller. In Raven Seek Thy Brother, he records the disastrous contacts with the world that followed his literary success.

Wordsworthian Woozle. It has been Maxwell's choice to adopt ways of life most mortifying to the flesh. He' has been a freelance journalist, and anyone who has engaged in this hazardous occupation knows well which way the lance is pointed. In war, he felt at home as a kilted instructor of Special Forces. For pleasure, he opts for places like Lapland or the marshes of southern Iraq, where the inhabitants live in mud and eat cormorant. He has written ten books, half of them about wild animals (including sharks) and two about wild men--the tribesmen of the Atlas Mountains and the Sicilian bandit Giuliano.

It might be thought that Maxwell is declining into tame middle age, now that he has begun concentrating so much of his attention on dogs. But no. At one stage, as he recounts in this book, there were 26 of them, all apparently with the run of the house. They had to be kept away from the otters, Edal and Teko, who had to be kept away from each other. And what dogs. Some were Great Danes, and even these were dwarfed by Dirk and Hazel--two gigantic Deerhounds nearly as big as bison. What it cost to keep this menagerie in protein staggers the imagination. Also, liberated otters kept returning to the old homestead, and for variety there were at one time a distressed Fulmar and Shearwater (birds of the albatross order) on the household roster.

Only a man capable of writing of a "benign vulture" could have found this zoo tolerable, especially when the rigors of Scottish weather made it a daunting experience to spend much time out of doors. Yet of such scenes and a large cast of nonhuman characters Gavin Maxwell creates charming books. He writes clear, vivid English free of the hoked-up sentiment and Wordsworthian woozle that clog the prose of all too many nature writers.

The Magic Tree. The charm of Maxwell's newest book is all the more puzzling for the fact that it is so unrelenting a catalogue of tribulations. There are the complications of the "simple life" in grim outposts such as the abandoned lighthouses favored by Maxwell, where transport and communications make things more expensive, he notes, than "any five-star hotel." There is the grisly episode involving Terry, Maxwell's young assistant, who developed gangrene after one of the otters bit him. As Maxwell relates it: "I remembered with sick horror Terry's fingers after they had been chewed off by Edal; the stench . . ." There are the libel judgments against Maxwell, awarded as a result of the bandit book. Finally, there is the forced exodus from Camusfearna, the bleak house that Maxwell made famous but that burned down a year ago. Only one otter was saved. Edal was solemnly buried at the foot of a rowan tree, to which the Highlanders attribute magic properties. For all the calamities documented by Maxwell, his book is infused with some of that magic.

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